Finiteness analysis

Abstract

This paper address quasi-termination (or finiteness) in general and termination of poly-variant partial evaluation in particular. A program is quasi-terminating if it only goes through finitely many different states. A terminating program is a special case of a quasi-terminating program, only going through finitely many states. Furthermore a quasi-terminating program can easily be converted into a terminating program that gives the same result except where the original program was non-terminating.

The following observation makes quasi-termination interesting when it comes to partial evaluation. Partial evaluation of a program will terminate iff the program is quasi-terminating in the static part of the state, i.e., only finitely many statically different states can be reached.

This paper develops a finiteness analysis, and shows how its results can be used to ensure termination of partial evaluation. The finiteness analysis is an abstraction of a transition semantics consisting of a dependency and a size analysis. It determines various kinds of inductive properties such as increasing, decreasing, and in situ increasing/decreasing arguments. Sufficient conditions for quasi-termination is then stated in terms of these properties.

Using the result of the finiteness analysis the binding time annotation of a program can be changes (parts of the static data are made dynamic) such that the resulting program is quasi-terminating in the remaining static part of the state. This guarantees that partial evaluation of the program will terminate. Our experiments have shown this algorithm to be powerful enough to handle complicated interpreters and self-applicable partial evaluators with good results.

Supported by University of Copenhagen, The Danish Research Academy, and ESPRIT BRA 3124 SEMANTIQUE